


Just Like Everyone's Child

by Shoi



Series: The Fifth House [1]
Category: Metal Gear, TVXQ!
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-27
Updated: 2013-02-27
Packaged: 2017-12-03 20:30:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/702336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shoi/pseuds/Shoi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Changmin lives his life now in an anxious twilight place of too-silent rooms and overly crowded minds not his own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just Like Everyone's Child

**Author's Note:**

> once upon a time a friend and i had a big old writing universe that was a combination of metal gear solid, korean pop idols, and a ton of original fantasy. here is a story from that universe.

Changmin lives his life now in an anxious twilight place of too-silent rooms and overly crowded minds not his own. He has never before had to worry about his immediacy like this; Changmin is fighting a war over the heads and hearts of the world. He has depended on the cool heads and evil capabilities of his elders to shield the world away from his carefully constructed inner space, has counted on the machinations of his bandmates to twist and twine the loose ends of their lives into neat and manageable climbing or hanging ropes. Left alone, he does not make softer ropes to tie things down or together. He forges cold and unforgiving chains, and he strings them all throughout his life, linking people, denying people, holding people back. In the infinite black space of his mind and the ether, these are not metaphors -- when he closes his eyes gleaming iron stretches away in all directions, weighing his arms, his legs, his neck.

The apartment belongs to all five of them, legally, another one of the silent ways in which they've indicated the borders of territory they intend to guard from invasion. It is frequently empty, save for the energy burst moments when three or four or all of them are home at once. Those moments grow or shrink in frequency as schedules and _sasaeng_ populations change, but when they occur they're like pleasant dreams: real and unreal at the same time, strangely colorless yet vivid, and, when over, almost impossible to remember properly. He knows Yoochun has come through that door more than once and hugged him with all his strength, he knows Jaejoong has come out of the second bedroom and smiled as they met, his hand finding Changmin's cheek in a gesture Changmin almost always tried to dodge before, he knows he's come in through the front with Junsu at his heels, complaining or laughing or silent and sullen. He knows he's come to find them all playing games in front of the television or making an early dinner before evening schedules, he knows there have been redecorations and furniture movings and fights over petty and not so petty things. He knows and yet he, the master of images, the hand of memory and vision, cannot make the images come back as anything other than half-remembered blur. They are stars still, each in their own distant galaxy light years away from the next, their light visible to each other only after agonies of time. 

Changmin is certain there is no psychic in the world as powerful as he is, not since his teacher died. Niko worked for the House, a shadow agency that specializes in impossible causes. Niko had been a cold, resentful man, who saw a hateful and corrupted world from behind the heavy gas mask he required to breathe. Psychics do not live easy lives, nor do they find the world a comfortable place to be, and Niko had been no exception, his thin, emanciated body covered head to foot in boiled, melted scar tissue. As a child in his native Russia, Niko had looked into his own father's mind and seen the subconscious there, the dozens of imaginings of his own small death at his father's hands, the irrational fury over his mother's death at his birth. Something had come over him, something Changmin knew he did not regret, something dark and heavy and smothering, and the village had burned down to every last man, woman, and child. Niko himself had not even been spared from his own wrath, but he wore his scars with indifference and self-righteous solemnity. "I will never have to prove myself as dedicated any other way," he'd said, "So long as I can point to these. I wanted to kill him, and so I killed him, and I ensured that not even an ash of him would remain. It isn't by the grace of God that I was saved by Uncle. There is no grace about me, and no God that knows my name." 

In the facility he'd been stolen to as a toddler, the place that had given him his power, Changmin had been Child Number Nine. He had not been able to see into anyone's mind, at first. That had come later, after pain, after scars. He'd thought later, perhaps, that his moment of fire-hatred had already passed him by, at a time when he was still powerless. He thinks now that perhaps it has not come yet at all. 

The ghost of Niko whispers that it will, it will. 

Yunho is their general, and always has been, but Jaejoong is their war machine. Changmin has learned well of war machines; he has grown up with the specter of dictators and nuclear bombs held in front of him as cold reality, as his everyday. He knows that beneath the shouts and admonishments of politicians, of presidents and prime ministers, men and women creep through the forest and the darkness and the city alone, to put these problems to sleep before the rest of the world wakes. Yunho fits every profile of the unsung hero that he has ever read or seen, and Changmin thinks that anyone who finds such a character romantic should try to love one. Yunho is tired and noble, angry and sorry for it, and he works and fights as though all their lives depend on it. There are times where this has been true, and despite everything it is clear that Yunho has not forgotten this, and will never forget this, and that going and going until the last ounce of strength leaves his body is his own way of protesting, of ensuring that it is clear to all around them who and what Yunho is really living for. But the stories Changmin knows say that eventually every hero finds the bomb, every hero sees the dull gleam of the machine through the trees, every hero hears the growl of the monster, and that instead of destroying it, as heroes should, the hero takes it for his own. And Jaejoong is a monster, in literal sense, a deep and fathomless black hole of entropy and madness and absence that even Changmin cannot look into. He knows that Jaejoong knows this too, that Jaejoong of all people is aware of all the dark and dirty things that people shove beneath their mental beds, all the words and thoughts and deeds invisible, that Jaejoong is perhaps the one thing in the universe that could destroy him. Changmin can lay no chain across Jaejoong's neck or wrists, because a thing like Jaejoong can only be chained by the one that owns it. But while Jaejoong is all essence of shadow and darkness, Yunho is not, and Yunho is master here. 

In Jaejoong's absence, Changmin attends Yunho himself, steering, guiding, diverting. Guarding. He does it for no one but himself, because whatever else Yunho may be, he is Changmin's brother first and foremost. In the ether he binds their wrists together, and when the other three are gone, neither of them is ever alone. The metal between them is cold, but it is secure. 

Changmin knows the people around him have their own agendas. None of them can keep him from seeing inside them, down to their very deepest waters. The people around him are fighting their own wars. Some of them are fighting with teeth and claws, some with magic power completely alien to his own, and some are doing the best they can armed only with their wits. But they are background to him, like ants to a dragon, small things to be ignored or discarded as neccessary. The time will come, he thinks, when they need to be tapped, or wielded like weapons. But for now, this is Changmin's war, the enemy his enemy alone to face, and he the only hand who can stay a tyrant's. 

In the facility, Child Number Nine had been subjected to something Changmin knew now to be called a psychic latency experiment. Under duress, the theory went, of fear or pain, under torture and terror, a potential young psychic will manifest power at a tremendous level. The theory had not been incorrect. George Sears, the man who had proposed it, had undergone it himself, and Changmin remembered his face more than anything else, impassive but faintly pleased, remembered the touch of that huge and hideous mind against his own small one, the black certainty of that man's universe-crushing power. He'd seen himself as nothing more than a tiny cog in that vast machine, and when the House and Niko had come to save him and the other children from Sears' facility, none of them could silence his screaming. 

He'd screamed, and the memory makes his throat ache, until Child Number Ten had come to his side. Number Ten was a psychic null, a dead-space of silence, as ear-ringingly relieving as the moment of a siren's cessation. Number Ten could not be read, Number Ten could not be puppeted. Number Ten was older, a little bigger, a little more coordinated, and though he too had been afraid, some part of him seemed to have known that being close to Number Nine was the most important thing he could do. 

Changmin doesn't miss Junsu, not in the way of missing people. Junsu is always accessible, at the short or long end of the chain around his and Changmin's necks. He misses instead Junsu's presence, and his voice in combination with Changmin's own, misses the unity of two and then of five. In his angry moments -- and they all have angry moments -- it is Junsu he is angriest at, for being the brave one, the stupid one, the determined one, the cowardly one. Changmin thinks that he and Junsu's galaxies are closest to each other, beaming their heat and occasionally their supernovas and meteor showers damagingly into each others' spaces. This is only the way of people who matter to each other, Changmin knows. 

The times when Junsu is home and Changmin is home and they are alone are the times Changmin can imagine best. There are taunts and there are punching matches, and there are exhausted evenings on the sofa unmoving, unspeaking, staring at the television. There have been tears, and blame. Changmin hates Junsu for enduring his blame, and his rage, for lying there stoically while Changmin's fury leaves bruises on his shoulders and chest. Junsu had been seriously ill in Los Angeles, and Changmin had almost torn the world apart to get back their connection. Junsu is not on this stage singing this song about punishment for leaving and Changmin wants to tear him apart for his temerity. He feeds the pride of cats that twine infuriatingly around his legs and surveys the dented hole Yunho's fist has left in the kitchen wall. 

Changmin is not like Yunho. He sees Jaejoong rise and leave alone in the mornings, his face calm and his eyes sweet and his throat bruised in a deep mottled ring in the shape of fingers, his back striped in tiger-marks with purple and brown, the faint smile on his lips smug and sure, and once Changmin stands in the kitchen doorway to watch him go. He says, as Jaejoong slides his shoes back on, "He did a number on you." 

"Yes," Jaejoong says, and he may as well be glowing. "He always does." 

"Does it make him feel better? You? Does it make you feel better?" 

"It's not about better," Jaejoong says. "All our lives, we're all going to be trying to make things better. Nothing's ever going to be perfect for anybody. But it makes me happy, and it makes him happy. And I think we have to try for happy, no matter how strangely happy comes to us." He squints at Changmin mildly. "Ahhh, I don't want to be philosophical this early in the morning, I have a meeting to get to." 

"I miss you," Changmin says. 

"Aim better," says Jaejoong, and Changmin can't help but smile a little. 

Changmin is the only person capable of tracking down and eliminating the man who made him what he is. He has trained for that moment, the moment at which his mind at last touches that man's again, the moment at which his strength will either be proven, or fail him. Niko had put the last of his life's energy into giving Changmin every weapon he could think of, every twist and turn of every subconscious twitch, every potential synapse fire. "Sears is hardly human anymore," Niko had told him, one of the last times they'd spoken before he died. "He's become nothing but a presence, swallowing everything that gets too close. He'll take every mind on this planet for his own if he isn't stopped." 

"I'll stop him." 

This is Changmin's war alone, but everyone he knows is fighting their own war, too. Every new face that crosses the stages he's known for almost a decade shines with its own internal hope and terror. Every small hand he sees is reaching for another hand, trying to join, trying to twine without ropes to hold together securely, without protective and powerful chains to ensure these soft human connections don't fly apart. Every mind races with its own turmoil, both mundane and eldritch: will she ever notice me, how will I ever perfect this dance, will I ever be powerful enough, will I be a good leader, will they hate me, will I ever be normal, will I be alone like this forever? 

And sometimes, from his distance, from his own galaxy on his own stage, Changmin replies to those small voices in a whisper easily mistaken for just another stray thought: 

You'll be all right. You'll learn. You'll make it. Someone will love you. Someone will carry you when you're hurt or sick. You'll get stronger. You'll be worthy. Don't be afraid. 

He doesn't consider himself a particularly kind or merciful man. He understands the necessity of ruthlessness, and of not looking back, and of letting go. But he knows when he was small, when he was only a number, these words were given to him, too, that someone bigger and older held his hand and let him be weak for a while. 

"I won't make fun of you if you cry," Junsu says in his ear, when it's dark and they're alone again. Changmin is holding on to the reality, the nearness, the sound of Yoochun on the phone to Sooyoung in the living room, of Yunho's laughter and Jaejoong's voice raised in annoyed complaint. There are four cats weighing down his blanket and Junsu still smells a little like the day's sweat. "You just seem tired lately." The chain between them is lax with their closeness and warm with affection and long history. They both have their names back, now. 

"I'm just worried about you," Junsu says, his voice gone a little plaintive. 

"I'll be okay," Changmin says. "Everything's going to be okay."


End file.
